To properly store the emails of employees who deal with securities, U.S. Bank has decided to use a hosted solution from Viewpointe.
“We were looking for a new solution that would scale because we know it’s an area that’s going to continue to grow,” says Robert Erickson, executive vice president, infrastructure services at the $341 billion-assets Minneapolis-based bank.
Securities laws generally require the archiving of related customer correspondence for up to seven years.
U.S. Bank selected Viewpointe’s hosted information governance platform, OnPointe, to automatically preserve and then dispose of emails generated in the departments of the bank involved in securities transactions. “One thing we liked about the solution was the ability to automatically enforce policies,” Erickson says. “We don’t have any issues with our current solution, but this allows more flexibility to adhere to those going forward.” In the future, the bank may use OnPointe for legal discovery as well.
The hosted software also provides global search and text analytics. “The other piece of this is that it lets us go in and quickly find information, so if there is a question or a regulatory mandate, we can e-discover quickly,” he says.
U.S. Bank looked at other products before choosing OnPointe, although Erickson declined to share which ones. “We normally look at three to five competitive products,” he says. U.S. Bank was already using Viewpointe technology to archive check images, so it had a comfort level with the vendor as well as its partner ZL Technologies.
Erickson expects the new software will streamline internal processes and reduce costs. “This is a managed service approach, so Viewpointe is responsible for managing that entire environment, so they’re managing the technology piece as well as the software,” he says. “It’s an approach for us to pay for it as a managed service based on how much we need, versus building this out internally and continuing to manage it ourselves.”
U.S. Bank is looking to use OnPointe for other purposes as well. “We will do some evaluation with them on network file shares and some of other areas for legal record holds.”
Viewpointe has seen an uptick in purchasing of its information lifecycle in the past six months, according to Rich Walsh, president of OnPointe Services. “The drivers are the explosion of information and the explosion of regulatory compliance,” he says. “The infrastructures supporting them are fragmented and overrun. Those two factors are driving everyone to look for solutions, and more people are looking for a cloud solution to do this.”
